Google Custom Search

Google Custom Search for your website:

Zoho Sites has been integrated with Google search engine that enables you to add a search box to your website in a few steps. With this, your visitors can search for and find any speck of content on your website.

1. To get started, you'll need an account with Google search. Create a free account here. https://www.google.com/cse/2. Click on "Sign In to Custom Search Engine".

3. Enter the URL of your site to search . in this case, the URL of your website on Zoho Sites. If required, you can also specify multiple websites to search from.

4. Click on "Create".

5. To customize your search engine's appearance, click on "Look and feel" on the left. An array of layouts appear on the right. For a perfect alignment on your website, we recommend you select "Results Only" option.

The color customization will not be applied because it might not suit your website's theme. We will apply the best fit so that the results appear as a native of your website's theme.

6. After you have customized your search engine, select "Setup" from the list of options on the left. You'll see the screen in the image below. Click on "Search engine ID" button marked by the arrow.

7. A unique ID will be displayed as in the image below. Copy it.

8. Log into Zoho Sites and access the Dashboard of the site you want to add custom search to.

9. Click on Site Options, then click on Show Search Box and update the unique search engine ID as shown in the image.

10. Like any other changes, publish your website for the search box to appear on your site. Here is how your custom search box would appear on on one of our themes.

Note 1: There is a delay associated with the search box. The search box would start appearing on your website soon after publishing, but it will start giving you results only after a while. This entirely depends on how frequently your site is indexed by Google bots. One way to make it happen sooner, is to submit your website's latest sitemap to Google. Here's how. Link Here (http://support.google.com/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=enHYPERLINK "http://support.google.com/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100283"&HYPERLINK "http://support.google.com/sites/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=100283"answer=100283)

Note 2:If you had used the site builder to create your website from scratch, then the search results would include the mobile optimized pages of your website too. To exclude them from showing up on search results, update the robots.txt file with the command, "Disallow: /mobile/'. For guidelines on editing the robots.txt file, refer this blog post. Link Here (http://www.zoho.com/sites/blog/elementary-seo-robots-txt.html)